I know my English is bad but it´s not like I´m talking Swahili here. Alex, I have never said that the Mafia was not into drugs. What I said is that the Mafia, its Commission to be precise, proclaimed a national ban on drug dealing at the Apalachin meeting. This was an agreement that had been worked out at a Commission meeting two weeks prior to Apalachin. To avoid confusion, a proclamation of this magnitude needed to be addressed to all bosses face to face, eye to eye and mouth to mouth. I also said that the effort was however meaningless because a lot of soldiers and captains were not willing to abandon drug dealing due to its large revenue.
No, I understand you perfectly HK. I'm just challenging the old ban-narcotics-at-Apalachin-in-1957 myth you're recycling from Joe/Bill Bonanno.
Do you have any other source?
Why did they not ban narcotics at the October 1956 Commission meeting among the "bosses face to face, eye to eye and mouth to mouth"?
You also are shifting the blame (a la Bonanno) for the narcotics trade just to low-level "soldiers and captains were not willing to abandon drug dealing due to its large revenue."
Like I said above, three of the attendees to the 1957 Apalachin meeting were high-level leaders who were already CONVICTED narcotics traffickers: John Ormento, Frank Cucchiara, and Joseph Civello. Also present at Apalachin was Carmine "Lilo" Galante-- Bonanno's high-level capo, who at the time was perhaps the biggest importer of heroin through Montreal.
Then, we can make a long list of the bosses or future bosses who had narcotics convictions or close associates, from Charles Luciano (1916) to Natale Evloa (1959) to Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo (1941).
It's just a convenient myth. The Mafia was up to its eyeballs in heroin since the mid-1930s-- 20 years before this supposed grand noble meeting to ban drugs was tragically dashed by those damn police in 1957.
